It is unclear how Bennett sustained the injury, but he did not return to Florida’s bench for the start of the second period before being ruled out.<\/p>\n
The 29-year-old logged just 5:11 of ice time in the opening period, winning two faceoffs and registering a minus-1 rating.<\/p>\n
Bennett entered Monday’s action with 19 goals and 42 points across 54 games.<\/p>\n
If the reigning Conn Smythe winner did suffer a substantial injury, it would most likely take him out of the running to be named a replacement to Team Canada’s Olympic roster. Bennett was left off the country’s initial squad, but after suiting up at last year’s 4 Nations Face-Off, he figured to be a prime candidate to be tabbed if an injury situation arose before the tournament in Milan.<\/p>\n
The Panthers have been bogged down with injuries this season, with stars Aleksander Barkov, Matthew Tkachuk and Brad Marchand all missing significant time.<\/p>\n
While Tkachuk recently returned, Florida was missing seven players from its regular lineup on Monday before Bennett left the game.<\/p>\n
Monday’s contest was a prime opportunity for the Panthers to make up ground on the Sabres in the standings. Florida entered the night sitting eight points back of Buffalo for the final wild-card spot in the Eastern Conference.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"It is unclear how Bennett sustained the injury, but he did not return to Florida’s bench for the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":454915,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[556],"tags":[64,63,575,85],"class_list":{"0":"post-454914","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-nhl","8":"tag-au","9":"tag-australia","10":"tag-nhl","11":"tag-sports"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/454914","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=454914"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/454914\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/454915"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=454914"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=454914"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=454914"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}